Drinking alcohol as the last choice in survival situation
I'm asking this just for curiosity: Imagine your are alone in the wilderness without any resources since a few days. You're dehydrated and you find a bottle of an alcoholic liquor in your baggage. Should you drink it?
Alcohol gives you a bit more time to find rescue instead of dying immediatly. But from a long term perspective alcohol is a bad drink, since it requires a lot of water to degrade the alcohol. Another side effect is that you're drunk and could lead you to a deadly decision.
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Alcohol is poisonous, it saturates your blood with sugars and will dehydrate you faster as your body sucks your own cells dry in need of water to dilute those sugars. If you're in a survival situation, and all that you have left is the heavy bottle of alcohol that you somehow forgot about and didn't notice weighing down your bag, the best thing to do with it would be to try and separate the water from the alcohol by distillation.
This can be accomplished, but unless you're a chemist and have the appropriate instruments or mad MacGyvering skills, you'd be better off pouring the alcohol out onto the ground to avoid the temptation of drinking it.
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Alcohol is a high flammable liquid so better answer is to spread it all over the woods (if there's any) and make a spark, the help will reach you faster than you thought. ;)
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As many other posters pointed out, drinking alcohol to prevent dehydration is counter-productive. However, there are other uses for a bottle of high-proof booze in a survival situation.
- When its proof is high enough to be flammable, it can be used as a fire accelerant or even as fuel for cooking
- It can be used to disinfect open wounds to avoid a nasty infection
- It can be used to disinfect water by mixing the water with a small (!) quantity of alcohol
Another thing which might be worth pointing out is that while alcohol will accelerate your death from thirst, it might prolong your death from starvation: One liter of booze has about 2000 kcal - about the daily calorie intake of an adult human (if you can keep it inside). But still: getting drunk in a survival situation is a very, very bad idea.
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If all I had was some liquor, I would not be drinking that. Drinking alcohol causes dehydration, so while you might feel some very very temporary relief from having liquid in your throat, it's going to hurt you in terms of dehydration overall. Additionally, as you said, alcohol leads to poor judgement and reduced decision making skills. That's only going to make it harder to find the actual resources you need to survive.
Alcohol and wilderness survival don't mix. It's possible to enjoy alcohol in the outdoors in a responsible manner, but if you get to a situation where the only thing you have is a bottle of booze and yet you don't have a means to purify water, you've made some poor decisions to get to that point.
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